It all started back in 1975 ... October 8th, 1975, to be precise.

Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minster and Gerald Ford was in the White House.  The world's first popular microcomputer - the Altair 8800 - was released. And Bill Gates founded Microsoft, to provide the computer language to run it.  NASA launched the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars, and Soviet cosmonauts spent 1 month aboard the Salyut 4 space station. In Cambridge, Frederick Sanger devised a method for determining the sequences of bases on a strand of DNA.

Bob McDonald was working at the Ontario Science Centre, wearing a lab coat and standing people's hair on end with static electricity.  But at the old CBC Radio Building, on Jarvis Street in Toronto, a group of young and inexperienced producers were launching a radical idea: a weekly one-hour program devoted entirely to science, hosted by a young scientist from Vancouver, named David Suzuki. It was called, Quirks & Quarks.

And that brings us to today, and our 35th anniversary program.  To celebrate this special occasion, we brought together 10 Canadian scientists, representing 10 different fields of science, and asked each of them to tell us about the extraordinary changes that have occurred in each of their fields, since Quirks first went on the air in 1975.

Listen to whole show (pop up player) or use this link to download an mp3.



Cosmology:  Dr. Barth Netterfield, Professor of Observational Cosmology, in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, at the University of Toronto

Neuroscience: Dr. Jody Culham, Associate Professor specializing in Neuro-Imaging, in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario

Climate Science: Dr. Danny Harvey, Professor of Climatology in the Department of Geography and Planning, at the University of Toronto

Renewable Energy:  Dr. Aimy Bazylak, Assistant Professor of Micro-scale Energy Systems, in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, at the University of Toronto

Planetary Science:  Dr. Ray Jayawardhana, Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics, and Professor in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, at the University of Toronto.

Listen to Part 1 (pop up player) or use this link to download an mp3.



Genetics:  Dr. Marla Sokolowski, Professor of Biology and Canada Research Chair in Genetics at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Fundamental Physics:  Dr. Lee Smolin: Faculty Member, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.

Ecology: Dr. Madhur Anand, Canada Research Chair in Global Ecological Change, and Associate Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph

Human Evolution:  Dr. Shawn Lehman, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, at the University of Toronto

Technology:  Dr. Mark Federman, Independent business and technology consultant.  He was previously Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto

Listen to Part 2 (pop up player) or use this link to download an mp3.


Related Links

• Photo gallery of Quirks hosts, past and present
• Listen to the Quirks 30th Anniversary program

Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein, Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0